Jules Molenda: Health care should be our top concern

Jules Molenda

Friday

Sep 28, 2007 at 12:01 AMSep 28, 2007 at 3:31 AM

On the U.S.'s broken health system.

When I was about 8 years old, I fell down a steep flight of stairs in our home. A half-century later, I can still recall the pleasant sensation of flying (sort of) mixed with terror at what I suspected would be an unhappy conclusion to the trip.
But it turned out to be the sort of fall a youngster’s pliable bones can endure – a similar fall today and I’d likely break my neck.
When I collected myself at the bottom, I found that I hadn’t been hurt at all, save for my ring-finger: its top joint veered off at an unnatural and fascinating angle.
My dad took me to the emergency room of the hospital, where the attending physician gave my finger a short, painful jerk and then wrapped it in a splint. A couple weeks later, we returned to the hospital. The splint was removed and the finger restored.
These were among my first visits to a medical professional, and I still recall the interesting fact (to me) that my father flashed his insurance card and, as a result, the treatments cost us nothing. My dad was employed at that time at the Ford stamping plant in Buffalo, N.Y. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now what a stamping plant does, but while he worked there, we enjoyed the benefit of a Cadillac (pardon the pun) insurance plan.
Auto workers today still have one of the best private health plans available, or at least they did until this week when General Motors and the United Auto Workers agreed that the union will take over responsibility for insuring retired UAW members.
The company will make a one-time settlement of somewhere in the $50 billion range in order to be relieved of this ongoing and growing liability. It’s likely that Ford and Chrysler will conclude similar agreements this year.
Retiree benefits for auto workers won’t change overnight, but they will change. The GM payout is roughly half the anticipated liability, meaning that sometime in the future retirees will take on a much larger share of the burden for their medical costs.
At that, they’ll still be better off than most privately insured American workers, whose company health coverage ceases completely upon retirement. And, of course, UAW workers are loads better off than those Americans at the bottom of the health benefit pile – the 48 million who have no health insurance at all.
America certainly needs to reorganize its healthcare system. Consider:
• Americans spend more per capita than any other nation in the world for health care.
• Despite that, the World Health Organization rates our system 37th in the quality of care it provides.
• Health-care spending already consumes 15 percent of the Gross Domestic Product. In a decade, that figure will climb to 19.6 percent.
• Medical bills are overwhelmingly the number one reason for filing personal bankruptcy in the U.S.
It’s not surprising that the candidates for U.S. president are learning that health care – and who will pay for it – is the top issue of concern this year, above even Iraq.
Americans are seeing their out-of-pocket health costs rising rapidly.
In fact, while wages have gone up 19 percent in the past six years and overall inflation has grown 17 percent, health-care costs have risen 78 percent over the same period.
As a result, all of the Democratic candidates and most of the Republican ones have offered some sort of health-care proposal.
The folks in Congress, who are a year away from another election, are currently rallying around a proposal to increase the funding for the CHIPs program that helps the states fund health benefits for low-income children.
Only the president, who has faced his last election, is opposed to the proposal.
Most of the plans being put forth these days involve an incremental change to the system – that is, people will be allowed to keep their current plans or they may opt into some sort of national program.
Because too many Americans – and most of the medical, pharmaceutical and insurance companies – fear socialized medicine, the idea of simply expanding a program like Medicare to cover all citizens isn’t palatable. But this would be more efficient.
Forty-four percent of Americans are already under a single-payer system – called the U.S. government. Uncle Sam insures federal workers, current and retired military and those under Medicare and Medicaid programs. The U.S. government, in fact, is the largest single health-care insurer in the world.
Currently, doctors, pharmacists and hospitals must deal with the frustrations of working with scores of individual plans.
Those who have stood in line while a pharmacist is on hold waiting to speak with someone in an insurer’s corporate office know of what I speak.
About 20 percent of the total dollars spent on healthcare in this country go toward administrative costs.
These costs would decline significantly under a single-payer system.
But whether Americans will accept a single-payer system or some cobbled-together private-insurance plan, it’s long past time for the U.S. to join every other industrial nation on earth in offering guaranteed health care to all of our citizens.
Lake Sun Leader
Contact the publisher at jmolenda@lakesunleader.com.

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